Python encoding issue, Network adapter not recognised

Question

Here is my piece of python code scratch.

 import os
 print 'netsh interface ip set address name="' + adapter + '" static '+ staticaddr +' 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1'

Until this point all is fine the adapter is included within my drivers.

Now when i run this (as an administrator)

 os.system('netsh interface ipv4 set address name="' + adapter + '" static '+ staticaddr +' 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1')

It fires this error:

La syntaxe du nom de fichier, de répertoire ou de volume est incorrecte.

Which means the command's syntax isn't correct.

I tried os.system('netsh interface ipv4 set address name="' + adapter.encode('ascii','ignore') + '" static '+ staticaddr +' 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1')

Now this kind of exception occurs:

'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x82 in position 11: ordinal not in range(128)

Where is the problem exactly ?

My network adapter's name is : Connexion réseau sans fil

Answer 1

adapter.encode('ascii','ignore') raises UnicodeDecodeError because adapter is a non-ascii str. To encode it (i.e. convert from unicode to str) Python first tried to decode it (i.e. convert from str to unicode) and failed (adapter is non-ascii).

Switch to unicode completely:

print (u'netsh interface ip set address name="' + adapter.decode('latin1') + u'" static '+ staticaddr.decode('ascii') + u' 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1').encode('latin1')

Answer 2

I've encountered a similar problem in my end. I have a script that lists all the previously connected wi-fi networks and their passwords. One network specifically ("Gestão TI") was giving me a headache, beacuse when I ran the command, the name came back as "GestÆo TI", and the following command couldn't run, because the name changed. I tried a few different encodings, such as UTF-8, Latin-1 and others, with no success. A frind of mine pointed out to me that maybe the problem was with the netsh encoding when it was exporting the names. As the netsh is fairly old, he suggested I tried using the old latin encoding (CP850) and it finally worked...